With the advent of the Minimum Requirements for Teacher Education Qualifications policy (MRTEQ), higher education institutions (HEIs) are rethinking curricula for teacher training in order to enable entree for in-service teachers to reskill, retrain and have access to higher qualifications. In the field of mathematical literacy (ML), most teacher training has been offered via government-funded Advanced Certificate in Education (ACE) qualifications, which have now largely been phased out. In this article we examine two ACE ML programmes offered in KwaZulu-Natal (KZN) in order to present some lessons that have been learnt. We put forward some elements that we consider to be essential for training ML teachers and also raise concerns about future training of ML teachers.